Jonah's Unwanted Believers
“So the people of Nineveh believed God….But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was very angry” (Jonah 3-4).
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In Jonah we read that “God prepared” a whale, a weed, a worm, and a wind. But the greatest work of God In Jonah is the New Creation brought on by a very ill-tempered preaching of the Word of God. This is the greatest recorded vival in history, and Jonah did everything in his power to prevent it. Yet, despite the loathing of the preacher, “Nineveh believed God.”
A Hispanic friend related a similar story to me. The largest church in his area had for decades sent missionaries to Latin America in search of converts. When the immigrants began showing up in larger and larger numbers here at home, they began noticing that “their countenance was not as it was before,” and it wasn’t long before the Church cut their losses and built a separate building across town to accommodate the new arrivals. Their complaint? Too many children that upset the tidy balance of the church. “You know what they say,” I said casually to one of the wives. “When you become more prosperous, you'll have fewer children.” “We love our children,” she said sharply.
Jewish believers felt threatened by Greek believers in Jerusalem. Even Peter, Paul said, was caught up in the hypocrisy. The Samaritan woman at the well was surprised that Jesus would even talk to her. For did not God Himself say, “you alone have I known among the nations of the earth?” If God rejected the other nations in favor of Israel, why would we not act accordingly? When Jesus spoke of “the Kingdom of God” in the days leading up to His Ascension, the Disciples were certain that He meant “restoring the Kingdom to Israel” (Acts 1). This self-centeredness is the basis of the Book of Romans, where Paul is forced to grapple with the question: “So what was the point of Israel to begin with?” Because, according to Paul, Israel was no more than the foundation for the house of God (“whose House are we”). All the promises, the suffering, the waiting--and this is all we get out of it?
The magnificent Temple, the pride of Jerusalem--it was nothing? They all thought it would become the platform of the new administration, when Israel will finally come into its own. The disciples (“the living stones”) gushed over the Temple stones. Jesus saw only the pile of rubbish it would become when the Emperor Titus was done with it in the “times of the Gentiles.” This was too much for “the sons of the kingdom” and most of them were “cast into the outer darkness.” They thought they had God figured out, when, as Jesus said, they had actually made “the Word of God of no effect” when they overwrote it with their additions.
“Doest thou well to be angry?” God asks Jonah. “Why are you angry?” God asked Cain earlier. Cain was angry because showing favor to Abel seemed to diminish Cain. Jonah was angry that God did not rise up and destroy Nineveh, for Jews were not to be forced to sit at the same table with unclean Greeks. Talk about the need for Critical Church Theory. But you can imagine what Jonah was thinking: today Nineveh, tomorrow what--Babylon? And there goes happiness. He was all too happy in the little world that was Israel. That “the field was the world” left little room for privacy. “Ye are not your own, ye have been bought with a price.” And Jonah did not have a billion dollar mission board behind him. Why would you need mission boards when “the stranger within thy gates” is banging on the church doors. And the Rev. Graham is still at it jetting around the world, staying in five star hotels (his salary is close to a million plus expenses). The entire Third World is in our backyard, their only defect being they are brown instead of “white unto harvest.” If these were Nordic, we would go out into the highways and byways and “compel them to come in.” Jonah would look at the shivering masses beyond the Wall and wonder what God was waiting for. “Better dead than red (brown),” says Jonah: “I do well to be angry, even unto death.” “You have pity on the weed (Jonah’s cozy shade),” God said, laying a finger on the problem. The new converts would greatly tax Church comforts. Like the Hispanic brother said, “Our many children were too much for them.”